The View from the Tower Business and Entrepreneurship in Depression Scotland
Ronnie Johnston
Ronnie Johnston is Reader in History at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. He has published extensively on the history of occupational health in the UK and is the author of Clydeside Capital, 1870-1920 (Tuckwell Press, 2000) and, with Arthur McIvor, of Lethal Work (Tuckwell Press, 2000), and Miners’ Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Ashgate Press, 2007). He is Deputy Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare in Glasgow, and Deputy Editor of the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies.
Spanning business history, labour history and economic and social history, The View from the Tower examines Scotland’s 1920s and 1930s from the perspective of the country’s industrial employers. Taking its title from the iconic Tower of Empire erected during the 1936 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, this book critically engages with the notion that entrepreneurial failure was a central reason for the decline of Scottish industry in the twentieth century.
…Themes explored include employer collectivism; regulation of trade; workplace health and safety; the political motivation of Scottish employers; and industrial relations and the General Strike. The book draws from a rich vein of unused primary source material, including employer association records, chamber of commerce records, company records and trade union material.
… Given that much of what we know about the interwar period
in the UK has been derived from working-class focused research,
The View from the Tower – as its title suggests –
provides a much needed top-down perspective on a crucially important
and under-researched historical period.
